In year 1, we began learning a bit about the basics of animation. However a lot of what we did use premade animations and simple techniques overall. I still 100% consider myself a beginner on the side of animating anything, and this was pretty apparent when we began learning how to animate in Maya.
A lot of sources have stated that Maya is the ‘industry standard’ for a lot of people when it comes to animation. I can definitely understand this, with many tools and options being available for people to use to perfect their animated characters. However, for someone who has never animated in his life, the number of options quickly overwhelmed me.
For one of our first lessons, we were tasked with animating a sack. Thankfully, it came pre-rigged and ready to work with, but this still didn’t make the job any easier for me. We were asked to try making the sack show emotion, watching a few cartoons and other media to outline the basics of how animation principles work. After a lot of difficulties, I was able to make this:
I tried to make the sack look sad/depressed, having it take a big sigh out before slumping over. I added a small bit where it would look around to see if anyone cared, but then go back to slumping over. While I was given positive feedback regarding my depiction of the sack, I still think I could have done better, with the idea of what the sack feels like being hard to read without me stating it directly beforehand.
Animation is something I definitely need to work on.